Our Thursday Thorns column is back this week with a report on the first preseason game for the Golden State Valkyries, and there are two ways to look at the first WNBA expansion team since 2008 through its first home game at the Chase Center in San Francisco: it was either a disappointment due to low attendance and mediocre play, or it was a rousing success as a symbol of this new era of interest in women’s athletics.

We’re going with the former, even as inaugural season-ticket holders for the Valkyries. It was just meh.

Why? Well, first off, the team isn’t very good, despite the one-point loss to the Los Angeles Sparks in the preseason exhibition matchup. That is to be expected, especially since Golden State didn’t get the No. 1 overall pick in the draft this spring. What kind of league doesn’t give its first expansion team in 17 years the top selection in its initial draft? We still don’t understand that decision at all, but it hurts the Valkyries a lot.

Can anyone name the player the team did draft with its first pick, the No. 5 overall? Some rando forward (Justė Jocytė) from Lithuania. She didn’t even play in this first game, and the Golden State GM “… isn’t putting pressure on Jocytė to be the ‘face of the franchise’ and wants that role to be filled organically.” That’s kind of a bad strategy for an expansion team that doesn’t have a face of the franchise at all at this point.

But we digress: the team is bad. The Valkyries never had the lead in the game, and they started out 0-for-13 from outside before finishing the contest with a less-than-mediocre 6-for-28 three-point rate. Again, the final score is somewhat irrelevant due to the preseason setting, but Golden State has a lot of work to do on the court to become competitive. That will hurt the team at the ticket-sales counter, for sure, and … well?

Despite announcing a tickets-sold number (17,428) that didn’t match the actual attendance (see photo above), Bay Area sports fans are total bandwagon. Once the novelty wears off, this arena could be half empty when Caitlin Clark and/or Sabrina Ionescu (a local product from the Easy Bay) are not in town. Admittedly, the Golden State Warriors were on television the same night, and that says a lot there, too.

Most Bay Area basketball fans would rather watch the winning Warriors on TV than see the losing Valkyries in person. Sure, the team is going to have its core loyalists, as it sold over 10,000 season tickets, but a lot of those won’t show up to every game this summer when the team is losing and finishing 8-36 in the standings. Like the San Francisco Giants did for years, expect the GSV front office to “fudge” the attendance.

It would have been awesome to be able to draft Paige Bueckers to help with something like this, but the WNBA must be banking on the Warriors’ success and team management to make this new franchise a success in the Bay. That’s a risky proposition, as people forget how bad the Warriors were from 1992-2012 and how it affected local interest. Only the Oakland Raiders overcame the bandwagon nature of fans here.

And they still left town—twice.

How this all bears out on the next two expansion teams in Toronto and Portland remains to be seen. The league probably will learn a lesson, though, and give those two expansion franchises the No. 1 overall pick, since they don’t have the same infrastructure support the Valkyries have. Either way, the WNBA may be banking too much on Clark to sustain this kind of expansion. We know how rough the league has had it.

[Editor’s Note: the Valkyries tried some cheering slogan along the lines of “Show Us Your ‘V’!” where the fans make a peace sign to represent the team mascot/nickname. We’re not sure they really thought that one through very well … we will be curious to see if it makes it to the regular-season home opener on May 16—and yes, we will be in attendance then, too. We are nothing if not loyal, of course, as Bay Area sports fans. Look for our report on that game after it happens!]